Hickory Creek at Winamac

Hickory Creek at Winamac is one of just a few available facilities in Winamac, Indiana. We awarded it an overall grade of B-, which is a middle of the pack score. You could definitely do worse than this place. The best part of this facility's profile was its remarkable inspection rating. We discuss inspections in the next paragraph.

To go along with its decent overall score, we gave this nursing home an A+ for our inspections rating. This grade is far more impressive than its overall score. Inspection grades are tied to several items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that score well in this category tend to have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This place was hit with 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered severe. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies to create an imminent risk to resident health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility also was awarded an impressive long-term care grade. As a matter of fact, we gave them a grade of B+ in that category, which happens to be one of our more favorable scores. When facilities receive a grade in this range in this category it typically means it has plenty of staff and is a quality place to reside on a permanent basis. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients healthy. This facility was also able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 1.03 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a much lower hospitalization rate than the average nursing home.

This facility was awarded its third best category score in the category of short-term care. We gave this facility a C in this area, which is a respectable score. In crafting our short-term care grades, we assess the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The objective is to create a tool for comparing the rehabilitation services of various nursing homes. This nursing home employs both physical therapists and registered nurses. Not all facilities employ these skilled professionals. The last measure we considered in this area is the number of residents who were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home. Unfortunately, this was below the national average.

The next category we rated was nursing. Unfortunately, we gave it an abysmal F in this area, which is a rock bottom score. This is clearly a significant disappointment. Nursing scores are tied to nurse staffing levels. With a meager 2.9 hours of nursing care per patient each day, this facility's nurse staffing levels were well below the national average. To pair with its subpar totals in the area of nursing hours per resident, this facility also did not fare as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing ratings. We looked at the percentage of patients sustaining pressure ulcers and major falls. This nursing home had more pressure ulcers and falls than the average facility. This could be a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores and falls are preventable with better nursing care. These metrics pulled down this nursing home's nursing rating quite a bit.